A Dark Mercy

There have been growing numbers of stories about the heroism of rescuers and medical personnel, such as this one, who risked their lives and personal safety and comfort to rescue, comfort and evacuate often critically-ill patients in New Orleans. But not all the medical care was directed at saving and healing the sick, as this troubling report indicates (HT: Orbusmax):

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals…

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she ‘prayed for God to have mercy on her soul’ after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William ‘Forest’ McQueen, said: “Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die.”

Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.

Their families believe their confessions are an indictment of the appalling failure of American authorities to help those in desperate need after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands of lives and making 500,000 homeless.

‘These people were going to die anyway’

The doctor said: “I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.

“I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul.”

The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: “This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.

“I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process.

“We divided patients into three categories: those who were traumatised but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying.

“People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second.

“It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.

“There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing.

“Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible.

“The pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand these people were going to die anyway.”

Mr McQueen, a utility manager for the town of Abita Springs, half an hour north of New Orleans, told relatives that patients had been ‘put down’, saying: “They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died.”

I find this story deeply troubling at any number of levels. I have written before on my concerns about the practice of active euthanasia (here and here), which arise not merely because of my Christian convictions about its morality, but perhaps equally so because of the great potential danger I see in breeching the moral and social levies which protect us from hubris and the creeping progressive tolerance of evil inherent when crossing them. The weariness of great tragedy saps the spirit, making it all to easy to rationalize the repulsive, to move on to the next horrid scene without reflecting on the last. But sometimes we must stop and focus amid the deadening blur of death and suffering. This story demands such a pause.

I am assuming, first of all, that this story is true–although I have seen no independent confirmation elsewhere. The name of the hospital where this occurred is not given, but it makes one wonder if it is the same facility where 45 dead patients were found abandoned. If it proves true, one must wonder whether there will be less outrage over patients euthanized than abandoned to die–somehow I suspect there might be. After all, they were terminated mercifully, rather than just abandoned–which would be oh, so terribly, terribly heartless.

But of course, if they were euthanized they were abandoned–abandoned by their providers and sworn protectors, those whom they trusted to comfort, heal, and protect them. Granted, the circumstances were horrendous: deprived of power, light, medications, and security, threatened by a mob of barbarians bent on drugs, theft, and destruction–one can hardly begin to imagine the terror, the helplessness, the frustration shared by doctors, patients, and nurses alike. It is easy to judge those who were there, sitting as I am dry, safe and secure, far from this hell on earth. It would be foolish to say that–were I there–my behavior would have been different, more noble, more self-sacrificing, more righteous. I would hope so–but I have been known to underestimate my frailties and potential for moral lapses far too often to be smug or self-righteous: I simply do not know how I would have handled this situation, were I there.

But still I must ask: you killed them? Actively, deliberately, methodically? What has occurred here, it seems, steps over a line clearly blurred by the panic, fear, and hopelessness of a terrible storm and its even more horrible aftermath–the opportunism of human evil in the face of Nature’s wrath–into the realm of a darkness far deeper than wind and water and chaos could wreak. Have you not countered evil with evil? “And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?”

Could not the morphine you used to end their lives be instead used to ease their pain, their fear, as you stood by their bedside doing what little you could to comfort them? It takes far more morphine to kill than to comfort. Could you not stand and defend them against the looters, the rapists, the thugs–though ill-equipped you might well lose your safety, your well-being, even your life. There is a word for those who act thusly, defending the weak against the strong at the cost of their lives: heroes. Did you not, by actively terminating their lives, avoid the shameful option of abandoning suffering and dying patients to save yourselves? They were condemned to die by their disease, by the untimely fate of a hospital in harm’s way, by social chaos and raging mobs. You are alive today because you expedited their inevitable death. But your life, so secured, is not enobled by this act: you may indeed find forgiveness, but the act remains: a dark mercy, an act of weakness, heinous forever.

The interview in The Mail is redolent with the special pleading and specious arguments so common among those who have compromised principles for expediency, and by those who justify any and all such moral relativism. The paper protects the anonymity of those who so acted “to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.” Scapegoats? Whose sins are you carrying into the desert, if not your own? What was the proximate cause of their death, if not your syringe?

The doctor informs us: “This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.” Aahh, compassion–I’ll have a double dose, please. Com-passion: “to suffer with”–this is its root, its meaning. To suffer with a patient, to experience their pain while strengthening their spirit–that is compassion. To stand in the breach, between the looter and the lost, to suffer that they may be spared–that is compassion. To stay with a dying patient, when the lights are out and you have no treatment to offer–that is compassion. To stop their breathing with an overdose so that you can escape without abandoning them to die alone may be rational, understandable, defensible, even arguably reasonable–but it is not compassion. Words have meanings: I know what murder means, what compassion involves, what comfort entails–and they are not the same.

The doctor informs us: “It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.” Death with dignity–is that indeed our right? Who ordains such a right? Who enforces it? What about the bloated bodies floating face down in sewage-laced water, drifting down streets in the company of dead rats and fire ants–is that dignity? Who stole their right to die with dignity? Would you have injected them also to save such an indignity? And how is it we now define “dignity” as the right to die when and where we want–or when our doctor thinks it’s best? Is not dignity instead dying with inner grace, strengthened by those around you, comfortable that your life has been lived with meaning and purpose–though your body be racked by pain–in the presence of others who care? Many died just this way in Katrina–under circumstances just as horrid and terrifying and degrading as the good doctor experienced. They died with dignity–brutally, but with nobility, grace, and courage, saving and protecting family members, pets, friends, strangers.

The doctor informs us: “You have to understand these people were going to die anyway.” Yes, I do understand–and that is true of every living breathing human on this planet. But your patients died early–in your time, not theirs, under your hand, not that of a looter, nor the ravage of a disease, nor the savagery of storm. Your hand, doctor. Who granted you this right, this power?

But someone in this story sees through the hollow rhetoric, the noble talk, the faux compassion: “Mr McQueen … told relatives that patients had been ‘put down’, saying: ‘They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died.'” America, meet your new compassion, your new dignity: the nurse will stay by your side after your doctor puts you down.

Now, perhaps this story is a tabloid fabrication. Perhaps–so often the case–the truth of the situation was mangled beyond recognition by truncated quotes, Dowdian ellipses, or the pure fabrication that passes for journalism in our oh-so-enlightened 21st century. And I was not there–would my behavior have been that much different? I don’t know. Tragedy rips the scab–covered by layers of makeup and cheap jewelry–from the deep wounds of the humans spirit. It may reveal bleeding, and pain, and health, and healing–or the putrid aroma of rotting flesh and festering maggots. A white coat does not bestow deity, but bespeaks instead service and sacrifice–and the dark horrors of a dying hospital do not change this simple truth.

Post navigation

13 thoughts on “A Dark Mercy”

Comment navigation

The first I heard of this story, I thought it to be plausible, but the more I think about it, the more skeptical I am becoming.
If true, though, I don’t think it’s possible to judge what was done as right or wrong given the situation.
Ethics burn up easily in Hell.

Could I just point out that, in addition to the unlikeliness of a single physician administering that much precious morphine to those patients without argument from other doctors and/or nurses — since it IS unlikely in the extreme that multiple people would simply go along with this, and just as extremely unlikely that so much painkiller would be given to the dying when there were living patients to care for and no planned resupply in the foreseeable future — there is also the issue of “multiple dead patients found in [a] hospital”. Yes, and? I would be pleasantly surprised if multiple dead patients were not found in many of the hospitals in the area, but I expect that there are. After all, many of the hospitals were not evacuated before the storm, and after the levee broke there would have been a number of ICU patients who either did not survive a trip to “safe” parts of the hospitals, or who did not survive the power cuts, or who survived so long and no longer with bagging alone for air, and dehydration. Many of those would have, sadly, had DNR orders put on them by the attending doctors, in simple recognition of the circumstances. And since in many of those same hospitals the morgue would have been underwater, the bodies would have been moved to a different wing and left. What other choice was there? And what were they to do when the evacuations finally came? Insist that the bodies come with them? No, the choice they made was the only one. Their duties were to those still living, and the dead would be collected later.

All in all, there are holes in this story you could drive a truck through without touching the sides. I think it had one purpose — to stir up moral outrage. Sadly, I think it did so by inventing a target. Given the newspaper’s past behavior, it is not an improbable course of action for them. They succeeded, though, didn’t they.